Page:The American Language.djvu/63

Rh Indian-file were obviously suggested by the Red Men. State–house was borrowed, perhaps, from the Dutch. Selectman is first heard of in 1685, displacing the English alderman. Mush had displaced porridge by 1671. Soon afterward hay–stack took the place of the English hay–cock, and such common English terms as byre, mews, weir, and wain began to disappear. Hired–man is to be found in the Plymouth town records of 1737, and hired-girl followed soon after. So early as 1758, as we find by the diary of Nathaniel Ames, the second–year students at Harvard were already called sophomores, though for a while the spelling was often made sophimores. Camp–meeting was later; it did not appear until 1799. But land–office was familiar before 1700, and side–walk, spelling–bee, bee–line, moss–back, crazy–quilt, mud–scow, stamping–ground and a hundred and one other such compounds were in daily use before the Revolution. After that great upheaval the new money of the confederation brought in a number of new words. In 1782 Gouverneur Morris proposed to the Continental Congress that the coins of the republic be called, in ascending order, unit, penny–bill, dollar and crown. Later Morris invented the word cent, substituting it for the English penny. In 1785 Jefferson proposed mill, cent, dime, dollar and eagle, and this nomenclature was adopted.

Various nautical terms peculiar to America, or taken into English from American sources, came in during the eighteenth century, among them, schooner, cat–boat and pungy, not to recall batteau and canoe. According to a recent historian of the American merchant marine, the first schooner ever seen was launched at Gloucester, Mass., in 1713. The word, it appears, was originally spelled scooner. To scoon was a verb borrowed by the New Englanders from some Scotch dialect, and meant to skim or skip across the water like a flat stone. As the first schooner left the ways and glided out into Gloucester harbor, an enraptured spectator shouted: "Oh, see how she scoons!" "A scooner let her be!" replied Captain Andrew Robinson, her